Excellent point. Music distributers created a divide; music (default white) and "race music." Partly they thought it to make more money, and partly for what you said.
I play a banjo. Not so good at it, but I like it. An instrument that came from Africa, with slaves or perhaps in their memories. Gourd banjos, three strings and a shirt dron…
Excellent point. Music distributers created a divide; music (default white) and "race music." Partly they thought it to make more money, and partly for what you said.
I play a banjo. Not so good at it, but I like it. An instrument that came from Africa, with slaves or perhaps in their memories. Gourd banjos, three strings and a shirt drone string. The modern banjo is a refinement and a truly American instrument. I've done quite a bit of study on it and contrary to what many believe, is path to white people was more complex than minstrels.
White and black musicians have always listened to each other and music was shared and or exchanged. Hate and racism have a hard time surviving that. The old songs were a newspaper, stories were spread with them.
True dat, hate and racism can't survive....what did you just suggest? CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!!! Good god man you've just destroyed the world. With a banjo.
Good job!
I destroyed it with belly dancing.
When I was in my early 20s my friends and I learned how to belly dance and I danced for entertainment later. The rest got married and had kids. Years later I connected with a few on Facebook and found my old roommate going on about how she sorta feels guilty now that she 'culturally appropriated' belly dancing back in the day. So I noted to her that us 'cultural appropriators' are actually the ones keeping it *alive*, because in the Middle East, it's a dying art....you know how much religious nutjobs hate women to be dancing 'n' stuff...it tempts men to not be the little pure-minded angels God made them to be ;) I noted that it had been banned in some places and attacked by fundamentalists (not always Muslim, Israeli has their female-haters in the Ultra-Orthodox) and that *we* Western women, living in our free worlds, were keeping it alive. It won't be the same as it was in the Middle East but...it never was the same as anything, because belly dancing grew and spread along with conquests, diasporas, refugees, intermarriage...and everyone learned from everyone else and different styles evolved, but they always fused with other styles and just became their own style.
Cultural 'appropriation' - it's a beautiful thing, really, whether it's banjos, zydeco, belly dancing or R&B. The world is what it is with cultural appropriation. Only in the last ten years was that seen as a *bad* thing.
(I will state there are a few times when I have sympathy for the 'cultural appropriation' argument - like when religions are appropriated and misused or abused - or when profits and the law are involved - like rich white boys taking over the newly-legalized weed business after so many black people were incarcerated for selling the same weed. But there my sympathy ends.)
Sadly, for some there is still some divide with both the banjo and blues harmonica, my other love. This has strayed a bit from Steves Commentary story, so I don't want to say too much about it. Some of us are trying, some have a political chip. I don't want to go partisan, so I'll leave it at that except to say that is being stirred up for political purpose. A crying shame.
Excellent point. Music distributers created a divide; music (default white) and "race music." Partly they thought it to make more money, and partly for what you said.
I play a banjo. Not so good at it, but I like it. An instrument that came from Africa, with slaves or perhaps in their memories. Gourd banjos, three strings and a shirt drone string. The modern banjo is a refinement and a truly American instrument. I've done quite a bit of study on it and contrary to what many believe, is path to white people was more complex than minstrels.
White and black musicians have always listened to each other and music was shared and or exchanged. Hate and racism have a hard time surviving that. The old songs were a newspaper, stories were spread with them.
True dat, hate and racism can't survive....what did you just suggest? CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!!! Good god man you've just destroyed the world. With a banjo.
Good job!
I destroyed it with belly dancing.
When I was in my early 20s my friends and I learned how to belly dance and I danced for entertainment later. The rest got married and had kids. Years later I connected with a few on Facebook and found my old roommate going on about how she sorta feels guilty now that she 'culturally appropriated' belly dancing back in the day. So I noted to her that us 'cultural appropriators' are actually the ones keeping it *alive*, because in the Middle East, it's a dying art....you know how much religious nutjobs hate women to be dancing 'n' stuff...it tempts men to not be the little pure-minded angels God made them to be ;) I noted that it had been banned in some places and attacked by fundamentalists (not always Muslim, Israeli has their female-haters in the Ultra-Orthodox) and that *we* Western women, living in our free worlds, were keeping it alive. It won't be the same as it was in the Middle East but...it never was the same as anything, because belly dancing grew and spread along with conquests, diasporas, refugees, intermarriage...and everyone learned from everyone else and different styles evolved, but they always fused with other styles and just became their own style.
Cultural 'appropriation' - it's a beautiful thing, really, whether it's banjos, zydeco, belly dancing or R&B. The world is what it is with cultural appropriation. Only in the last ten years was that seen as a *bad* thing.
(I will state there are a few times when I have sympathy for the 'cultural appropriation' argument - like when religions are appropriated and misused or abused - or when profits and the law are involved - like rich white boys taking over the newly-legalized weed business after so many black people were incarcerated for selling the same weed. But there my sympathy ends.)
Sadly, for some there is still some divide with both the banjo and blues harmonica, my other love. This has strayed a bit from Steves Commentary story, so I don't want to say too much about it. Some of us are trying, some have a political chip. I don't want to go partisan, so I'll leave it at that except to say that is being stirred up for political purpose. A crying shame.